Catalog & product sync

Your catalog is the foundation everything else stands on. Zubby AI can only recommend, search, and answer questions about products it has synced and indexed. This page explains where the catalog comes from, how it stays current, and how to read the data Zubby keeps about each product.

You’ll find it in the dashboard at Catalog → Products (the sidebar label is Products).

Where products come from

Zubby never asks you to upload a spreadsheet. Products flow in automatically from the store you connected:

Re-syncing on demand

The catalog stays current on its own, but you can force a refresh any time. The Trigger sync button at the top of the Products page queues a full catalog sync — useful right after a bulk edit in Shopify or WooCommerce, or if you suspect something drifted. You can also rerun a sync from Catalog → Imports.

How search and embeddings work

Syncing a product does two things. First, it stores the structured data — title, description, vendor, type, variants, prices, inventory, collections. Second, it generates a 1536-dimension embedding(a numeric fingerprint of the product’s meaning) and stores it with pgvector.

That embedding is what lets the agent do semantic search. When a shopper asks for “something warm for hiking in the rain,” Zubby doesn’t keyword-match — it compares the meaning of the request against every product embedding and surfaces the closest matches, then re-ranks them. This is the same retrieval layer the knowledge base uses for policies and FAQs.

Embeddings regenerate whenever a product’s content changes, so a rewritten description is searchable within a minute or two of syncing.

Catalog overview metrics

The top of the Products page shows four counters so you can gauge whether the catalog is healthy enough to power good answers:

• Products — total synced products.
• Variants — purchasable variants across the catalog. Thin variant coverage makes recommendations feel shallow.
• Draft products— products still in draft state. Highlighted in amber because drafts usually shouldn’t be recommended.
• Descriptions missing — products with no description. These are the weakest links for AI answers and the best candidates for the AI Catalog Improver.

Below the counters, two demand cards — Back-in-stock demand and Price-drop demand — show how many shoppers are waiting on inventory or a price change, with the top products driving each. Use them to prioritize restocks and pricing reviews, or to spin up a journey.

The product detail page

Click any product (or open one from a demand list) to see exactly what the AI is indexing for it. The detail page is laid out as:

• Product intelligence — status badge (active / draft / archived), vendor, type, and four metrics: variant count, recommendation events, back-in-stock subscribers, and price-drop subscribers. The stored description is shown verbatim, plus a plain- English read on whether inventory demand or price sensitivity is stronger right now.
• Collections — which collections or categories the product belongs to. Good categorization improves how the agent groups and cross-sells.
• Variants — SKU-level rows with title, SKU, price, compare-at price, and inventory quantity. This is where you verify that pricing and stock actually synced, not just the product shell.

The detail page also hosts the AI rewriting tools (Catalog Improver, PDP rewriter, and any nightly autopilot draft) and quick links to create back-in-stock or price-drop journeys for that product.

Gotchas

• Drafts and archived productsstill sync so you can inspect them, but they generally shouldn’t be recommended — use an exclude rule if you see one slipping through.
• No products after connecting? Confirm the worker is running and (for WooCommerce) that the plugin handshake finished, then trigger a sync manually.
• Edited a product but the AI still cites the old copy? Give the embedding a minute to regenerate, or trigger a sync to force it.

Related

• AI Catalog Improver — rewrite titles, descriptions, and SEO copy with brand voice.
• Product recommendations — how synced products get ranked and suggested.
• The AI agent — how retrieval turns your catalog into answers.
• Knowledge base— everything that isn’t a product (policies, FAQs, guides).